Tag Archive for 'Olympics'

Britain’s Hall of Fame skier, Chemmy Alcott will carry the Olympic torch during during its 70 day journey from Land’s End to the Olympic Stadium on July 24th.

The national torch relay involving more than 8,000 people begins its journey May 19 and will cross the journey before arriving at the site of the Olympic ceremony on July 27th. Alcott will carry the torch through the London Borough of Ealing.

“It is an amazing honour and privilege to be selected to carry the Olympic Torch and to be part of the most important and prestigious sporting event in the world,” said Chemmy who hopes to be back representing Britain at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

California and Nevada have launched an exploration of a possible bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics.
Fifty-two years after the Olympic flame was first ignited in the Tahoe region, California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom and Nevada Lieutenant Governor Brian Krolicki announced today (April 5) the formation of the Lake Tahoe Winter Games Exploratory Committee (LTWGEC), a new joint California Nevada initiative dedicated to developing an Olympic Bid for the 2022 Winter Games. Continue reading 'Lake Tahoe considering an Olympic bid for 2022'Print This Post

As the Official Alpine Skiing Venue of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, Whistler Blackcomb have unveil an Olympic Legacy display at the Roundhouse Lodge on Whistler Mountain. With Canada’s record breaking medal haul on home soil, the display illustrates the successes of local Olympic and Paralympic winter athletes as well as Games-time highlights. It records the achievements at the Games of Whistler’s local athletes, Sea to Sky athletes and all medal winners in the alpine events that took place on Whistler Mountain. Continue reading ‘Olympic tribute unveiled in Whistler’

Tourist Office

Description

The site of the 1960 Winter Olympics and internationally recognised world-class ski resort. Squaw Valley has a huge number of chair lifts serving one of North america’s largest ski areas. There’s a ski-in resort at Squaw Creek opened in the early 1990s followed by a new pedestrian village.

Review

One of North America and the world’s major resorts, Squaw Valley ‘s history as a ski resort dates back to the late 1940′s when the resort’s first chairlift was installed. A little over a decade later the resort’s meteoric rise saw it hosting the 1960 Winter Olympics. With more than 30 lifts, including North America’s first Funitel, serving 4000 skiable acres Squaw is definitely a world class resort. The ski-in and ski-out lodging property, the Resort at Squaw Creek, opened in the early 1990s.

Still family owned, Squaw is sensibly following the trend in North America’s top resorts and has extended its existing slopeside lodging to create a state-of-the-art $250 million resort village, in partnership with Intrawest who run a dozen major North American resorts. It incorporates over 80 shops and restaurants as well as more than 700 condos.

The resort’s move into the 21st century has been boosted by the $20 million investment in a new Funitel. This is a combined gondola-funicular system with 46, 28 person cabins capable of transporting 3000 skiers per hour in winds which had, on occasion, caused the resort to suspend operations of older lifts on the higher slopes. The ascent time has also been cut from 12 to 8 minutes.

The resort’s achievement in hosting the 1960s Olympics is still a topic of conversation more than forty years on. It wasn’t just that the area succeeded in staging what was then the world’s largest games, with a thousand competitors from 34 nations, a little over a decade after Squaw’s inception, but that the resort actually won the bidding five years earlier, in 1955, when it was virtually unheard of outside California.

The first Games to be nationally televised and to house the athletes in their own Olympic village, the opening and closing ceremonies were orchestrated by Walt Disney and involved over 5,000 participants and the use of 1,285 musical instruments.

Squaw Valley’s history does go back a little further than the start of the ski industry in the area of course. The Washoe Native Americans were the original inhabitants, then the town of Claraville grew up in the 1860s where today the entrance to Squaw Valley stands. The valley’s popularity then was the result of silver being discovered in the area. The town’s population peaked at 1000 residents and, whilst ranchers, shepherds, miners and trappers came and went, it wasn’t until the Squaw Valley Development Corporation was established in 1948 that the area really took off.

It’s going to one heck of a winter in Germany’s alpine ski region of Upper Bavaria.

In addition to being one of Europe’s up and coming ski destinations, Bavaria’s ski areas will host a plethora of major competitions this upcoming season, giving tourists many excuses to visit the historic region.

The 2011 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships will be held in Bavaria’s famous Garmisch-Partenkirchen ski area from February 7th till February 20th. Garmisch-Partenkirchen last hosted the World Championships in 1978. It also hosted the first Olympic alpine skiing competition at the 1936 Winter Olympics.

Garmish has invested heavily in preparing for the World Championships, including the creation of a second downhill slope to compliment the famous Kandahar downhill, and the addition of several new cable cars and chair lift.

According to the mayor of the town of Garmish, Thomas Schmid, the ski resort has invested about 60 million Euros ($80m) for the event, and another 42 million Euros ($57m) has been spent to speed up the train from Munich to Garmish for 2011. The train is well-known because skiers can take the train from Munich with their skis on, because it stops 200m from the bottom of the ski hill. The train ride takes about an hour and a half.